Wiser Media — 2020

As founders we are fuelled and measured by speed. If anything, the outbreak has given most of us the chance to take a step back and reflect. And here’s a reflection on where we are with respect to our mission, milestones we’ve got to hit and communicate again why we believe we’ll pull this off.

Rethinking who we are

Wiser is an interactive catalogue for great content — podcasts, videos and articles that are all hand-curated by our community. Our mission is to connect people in an intellectual context and inspire them to create real connections, take real actions. We help our members diversify the tools by which they discover content, so they are not left with what an algorithm or their creators are making them see.

Designing for that requires a constant dialogue with our users — so we’ve decided start a podcast to better communicate who we are as an organisation. And we fully leveraged the “quarantine time” to find guests, practice and record. We are also organising events/meetups to bring our community together when things are back normal — not just to get feedback but to demonstrate what we mean by real connections, which for us means bringing together very interesting people who will chat about things they find stimulating.

Rethinking our metrics

Most learnings originate from failures. Many media startups preceding us (and many who are still out there) showed that screen time isn’t everything. Going forward, we need less screens and more real connections. And as media startups, we need to create new KPIs.

What we are designing for is a sense of empowerment — and our North Star is somewhere between the inspiration and the action.

“Do they feel the kind of awakening when they learn something they didn’t know existed?”

“Do they feel empowered?”

“Will they take action?

The social impact of a startup, I believe, stems from the cumulative effect of all the feelings the product creates with every individual user. If it creates FOMO at an individual level, the social impact will just be a large coefficient of that. If media companies and social networks had inspired as much as they depress their users, there would’ve been a whole different vibe in digital.

We need to support our users — help them feel good about themselves with the connections they make and the things they learn.

Rethinking Scale

Amid great uncertainty, what gives us and our investors the confidence we need is a fairly clear picture we’re betting on: As the quality and the quantity of everyday content improves dramatically, curation will become as important as the content itself. Think of it this way — content is the song you love, curation is the playlist your friend recommends to you, which not only creates a new bond/connection between you and her, but also multiplies the experience by 20 with the 20 new songs you’ve discovered. And this will find its form for other types of content — podcasts, videos, articles. Not many people understand this today. Just like they did not understand content 10–12 years ago.

The past decade showed us the power of content for as a core marketing tool. Taking it to the next level, brands will curate content in order to be at the epicentre of what their brand is all about. RedBull will not just create great content on extreme sports, it will also curate the best of the best for its community. Only that way, it can stay at the heart of the conversation.

The term “blogger” indicates a person who writes regularly.. Just like individuals bloggers, vloggers, journalists, we’ll have individual curators. And these people will become the new media influencers. And Wiser will be the platform where these influencers emerge, grow and get paid.

Catching up

I’ve been lucky enough to know great minds who are working on great things and progressing impressively in their careers. Ambitious careers, however, tend to come with not being able to see and talk to friends as often as we’d like. The outbreak also gave us the chance to connect and get each other up to speed with everything.

Tell us what you’ve been up to! And if any of the stuff above resonate with you, we’re at wisermedia.com. Feel free to request access for the invite-only Beta — available in Sweden, UK and Turkey.